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Shionmi cast episode 687 prepping for the moon. Welcome to astronomy cast, a weekly

whole well you don't know the Chinese language stuff but you've been tracking the Chinese

space industry a whole lot closer than I have. Yeah. Hand in hand with learning the language

and that is going to be awesome because I can sit back and learn today. Yeah, how do

all right let's go. So we're going back to the moon in the next few years humans will set foot

on the moon again ideally this time to stay but this will be different than the Apollo era going

to the scientifically fascinating and difficult southern pole of the moon. What needs to be done

to prepare the way back to the moon? So what is the plan? I mean to return to the moon if

all goes well what's going to happen? If all goes well there is going to be a space station

the NASA Gateway that is positioned between here in the moon that essentially acts like the

spaceship version of a train station allowing people to fly safely from earth to the gateway on

Starship on Orion all of the plans they show show Orion and then once they're

get rested up and then ferry back and forth from the moon. The next step is there are plans that

are still a little bit fuzzier not as many contracts have been made to create a habitat on the moon

where folks will be able to live, rove, explore and stay in contact with Earth thanks to a network

of satellites. Right and I guess what does the south pole of the moon what makes this more logistically

challenging than going to the places they landed during the Apollo missions? So there's basically

three big problems I'm going to start with the least intuitive and that is the orbital plane.

When you look at the moon it is not that tilted relative to the Earth it's tilted about a degree

in a half relative to the Earth's orbital plane and getting from here to there it's super easy to

put yourself in an orbit that has plus or minus 20 degrees inclination but the south pole is not

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